A quick trip to the Green Valley sewage ponds this morning succeeded: one of the two recently reported Short-billed Dowitchers was feeding along the edge of the first pond, a nice bright tiger-tertialed juvenile. But then a big yellow machine appeared and started scraping the edges of the basin, and the bird flew, calling, into [...]

Tropical seas and their birds are only a few hours’ drive from Tucson, and Scott, Darlene, and I set out early yesterday morning for Puerto Peñasco, where the heat and humidity lived up to expectations, and the birds exceeded them!
We had 10 hours on the eastern shore of the Gulf of California, and ended our [...]

An amazingly birdy day out with John (from Ohio) and John (from Florida) produced on the order of 90 species, including many of their targets for this quick visit. California Gulch rewarded our considerable effort getting in with Five-striped Sparrows and singing Montezuma Quail, and Sycamore Canyon’s Rufous-capped Warbler finally sang, chipped, and emerged into [...]

The Institute for Field Ornithology has announced its 2007 offerings, including my Tropical Deciduous Forest workshop:
http://www.americanbirding.org/ifo/workshops/2007tropical.html
Send me an e-mail if you would like the annotated lists from our most recent visits to northwest Mexico.

The sewage ponds at Avra Valley are widely and rightly famed for the waterbirds and waders they attract; any site that turns up Wood Duck, Tricolored Heron, and Black Tern in the middle of the desert deserves its renown.
All those were among the 63 species Denis and Rick (”the other Rick”) and I enjoyed on this [...]